City2City

Climate Adaptation and Urban Rural Transformations in the Horn of Africa

Friday, 25 February, 2022

CLIMATE ADAPTATION AND URBAN-RURAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE HORN OF AFRICA

by Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs

EVENT BACKGROUND

Date and Time: Thursday, February 17, 2022 | 12:00-1:30 p.m. EST

Format: Zoom Webinar

The Horn of Africa has for decades been one of the continent's fastest changing and most turbulent regions. It is also still a disproportionately rural region, with tens of millions of subsistence farmers and pastoralists who have extensive experience with weathering meteorological variability but who, for a host of reasons, are nonetheless among the world's most vulnerable populations in the face of climatic upheaval. This panel featuring some of the region's leading experts on sustainable development will take stock of ongoing efforts to adapt to intensifying climatic changes and the parallel challenges of strengthening sustainable livelihoods in remote rural areas and the Horn's rapidly growing cities.

This event is the latest installment a new webinar series through which the Center on Global Energy Policy seeks to foreground the heterogeneity of perspectives found around the continent on what climate means in different African contexts and how more than one billion Africans are already living with extraordinary climatological variability and constraints on the use of natural resources.

Moderator:

  • Harry Verhoeven, Senior Research Scholar, Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA

Panelists:

  • Balgis Elasha Osman, Chief Climate Change Expert, African Development Bank
  • Yifru Tafesse, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Ethiopia's Agricultural Transformation Agency
  • Simon Wagura Ndiritu, Associate Professor, Strathmore University Business School